When Bowman High School junior Matt Hochhalter threw a shot put Monday during track practice, it disappeared. So Bowman School officials started to dig.
After carefully prodding around the area where the shot put was last seen, officials noticed something: An old 17-foot well.
"The coaches and athletes thought it was a sinkhole because the shot put area is close to a drainage area and with all the moisture we've had and high water table we have around here, our city engineers felt it could have been a sump hole," said Tony Duletski, Bowman County School superintendent. "We further investigated and it turned out to be an old abandoned well."
The shot put area is located near a football field.
The discovery shocked everyone, said Jon Jahner, Bowman County Athletics track and field coach.
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"It was just practice on Monday and they were doing some practice throws," he said. "He threw the shot put and it went all the way down.
"The throwing coach had seen it and gotten all the kids away from there and then I went over and we had taken a look at it and it was all full of water. We didn't know what it was."
They called city engineers to look further into the hole and pump water out of the area.
"I'm going to try to get some documents and talk to some retired coaches about how long that shot put area has been there and who might have owned the land," Duletski said. "I can say this -- the curbing into the well was made out of wood, so it is very old."
In remarkably good shape, the well's construction surprised Duletski.
"I think it was a concept of like a wooden barrel," he said. "I've seen wooden wells and wells with wooden curbing but I've never seen anything in this good of shape."
The well has since been secured and closed off as not to pose a risk to students or bystanders, and Duletski said he's going to be in contact with the Environmental Protection Agency to see what the proper steps to safely seal it are.
"It's interesting to find a well in the middle of a shot put area. Someone said this was like the 'Beverly Hillbillies' story -- if we'd hit oil we would have been in real good shape," he said.
